but I have it no longer. I write from memory.' One
wondered in what vicissitude he had sold it, and for what money; and an
image of the man rose in the imagination. To be his ordinary self as
much as possible, not a scholar or even a reader, that was certainly his
pose; and in the lecture he gave at Oxford he insisted 'that the poet
should hide nothing of himself,' though he must speak it all with 'a
care of that dignity which should manifest itself, if not in the
perfection of form, at all events with an invisible, insensible, but
effectual endeavour after this lofty and severe quality, I was about to
say this virtue.' It was this feeling for his own personality, his
delight in singing his own life, even more than that life itself, which
made the generation I belong to compare him to Villon. It was not till
after his death that I understood the meaning his words should have had
for me, for while he lived I was interested in nothing but states of
mind, lyrical moments, intellectual essences. I would not then have been
as delighted as I am now by that banjo-player, or as shocked as I am now
by that girl whose movements have grown abrupt, and whose voice has
grown harsh by the neglect of all but external activities. I had not
learned what sweetness, what rhythmic movement, there is in those who
have become the joy that is themselves. Without knowing it I had come to
care for nothing but impersonal beauty. I had set out on life with the
thought of putting my very self into poetry, and had understood this as
a representation of my own visions and an attempt to cut away the
non-essential, but as I imagined the visions outside myself my
imagination became full of decorative landscape and of still life. I
thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle
of my own mind and body, a grain of sand in Bloomsbury or in Connacht
that Satan's watch fiends cannot find. Then one day I understood quite
suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and
unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always
out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its
hand. The more I tried to make my art deliberately beautiful, the more
did I follow the opposite of myself, for deliberate beauty is like a
woman always desiring man's desire. Presently I found that I entered
into myself and pictured myself and not some essence when I was not
seeking beauty at all, but merely